Incoming!

Via a mailing list I subscribe to, folks at the Internet Storm
Center are pretty
irate
at an assignment given by an actual professor at an actual state
college. They quote, allegedly verbatim, from the assignment:

Student is to perform a remote security evaluation of one or more
computer systems. The evaluation should be conducted over the Internet,
using tools available in the public domain.

…

In conducting this work, you should imagine yourself to be a security
contracted by the owner of the computer system(s) to perform a security
evaluation.

The student must provide a written report which has the following
sections: Executive summary, description of tools and techniques used,
dates and times of investigations (AKA break ins), examples of data
collected, evaluation data, overall evaluation of the system(s)
including vulnerabilities.

The ISC folks point out that what the prof is requiring
his students to do is almost certainly illegal, and therefore
suggest that students also include in their written reports:

Dates of student's incarceration so that they can be excused from class
and not counted absent.

There are a number of other amusing observations at the ISC; nothing
more inspires the writing of computer geeks than anger
at others' stupidity.

I say "amusing". I hope I still find it amusing after the attacks are
over.

Lefty Hypocrisy on Free Expression

Oh, I know: what could possibly be interesting about
lefty hypocrisy on free expression? Isn't that kind of dog-bites-man?

Well, maybe. This is entertaining mainly because it involves
Cathy Siepp, who probably can make anything interesting, turn
the world on with her smile, etc.

Start with her LA Times op-ed here (free
registration required, I think). It recounts a trip with
a friend
to the City Lights
bookstore in San Francisco, famed for stocking controversial books
that no one else will touch.

But then the friend thinks …

… perhaps the long-delayed English translation of Oriana Fallaci's new
book, "The Force of Reason," might finally be available, and that
because Fallaci's militant stance against Islamic militants offends so
many people, a store committed to selling banned books would be the
perfect place to buy it. So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was
in yet.

"No," snapped the clerk. "We don't carry books by fascists."

Oops.

Cathy points out that it's "particularly repugnant that someone who
fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist
by a snotty San Francisco clerk." And she demonstrates that, at least in
some quarters, free speech is only worth protecting if it's in service
to correct causes (To requote a British Muslim: "peace or social
justice", for example.)

Continue on, if you wish, to Prof Volokh's blog
entry pointing to Cathy's article, which I will quote
in its entirety:

A very good piece (as usual).

This one-liner has gathered, as I type, nearly 100 comments
with an unusually low light/heat ratio for the Volokh site.
Feel free to check them out for yourself, but I'll do my own
summary of the anti-Cathy ones: in a conflict between
free expression and certain "progressive" goals, we'll be
happy to jettison free expression in a scant second, and
how dare you criticize us for doing so.

Finally, check Cathy's own brief article on the
hurly burly, both funny and smart.

Flightplan

This movie got poor reviews (37% on the Tomatometer), but
it's really not that bad. Maybe it's that movie critics tend not to
be parents of small children, and haven't recently had that sinking
feeling of losing track of a kid.

That's what happens to Jodie Foster here, and it happens, of all places, on a
transatlantic jet flight. And unfortunately, the other passengers and
flight crew soon have their doubts whether the child was on board at
all. Nobody seems to have noticed her except Jodie!

Jodie Foster is a fine actress, and the other cast members are pretty
good too.
To go into detail would require major spoilers here, but
the real problem is that the plot becomes more and more
farfetched the more you think about it. Well, that understates things:
it becomes completely unbelievable. (If you're
so inclined, check the IMDB message boards where
they fly jumbo jets through the plot holes.)

But it's pretty easy to suspend
disbelief while watching the movie; things move along
at a decent clip once the child disappears.

I guess when you make a movie like this, you're pretty much giving up
on selling it as an in-flight movie.

Blogiversary

It's been a year since the first
entry at Pun Salad. So a few notes are in order to mark the occasion.

It's been fun. It's still fun. I plan on sticking around.

If I had to come up with some other reason besides
"fun" for blogging, I'd guess that it's somewhat worthwhile
to get one's thoughts ordered enough to HTMLize, and discipline
oneself to blog on a semi-regular basis. Otherwise, one could
find oneself doing … what? Well, probably something
less reputable.

I got into it with no expectations other than having an outlet
for random thoughts. Readership remains small; I'm pretty
far out on the long tail.
That's fine. What my readers lack in numbers, they make up for in
their intellectual qualities, outstanding senses of humor,
and good looks. (Yes, you there. I'm talking
about you. You're smart, funny, and cute.)

People link to the darndest things. I've put a lot
of work into postings that, as near as I can tell, went unread
except by some IP address in South Africa, and various web spiders.
But a near-throwaway comment about meeting Richard Feynman long ago
got a link from
the Blogfather, and an accompanying spike in hits. (I had visions
of coming in the next day to find the web server melted down into
a gray plastic puddle. But it muddled through.)

Despite all the high-minded seriousness exhibited here,
Pun Salad is currently at the top of a Google query
for "girl
Bob's discount furniture ads". I'm glad to provide this service for the
Internet community.

Live Free or What?

I feel I've been scooped by the good John Hinderaker at Power Line
on a matter pertaining to my beloved state of New Hampshire.
I would be derelict if I did not chime in on the issue. John says:

When I lived in New Hampshire, I enjoyed the perennial battles over the
state's motto, "Live Free Or Die." It was on New Hampshire license
plates then, and still is. The motto has been around for quite a while.
It comes from a quote by New Hampshire's greatest Revolutionary War
hero, Gen. John Stark. Stark reportedly gave a toast in 1809, when poor
health led him to decline an invitation to a reunion of veterans of the
1777 Battle of Bennington: "Live free or die; death is not the worst of
evils."

It's been the state motto since 1945. As I pointed out here,
it's really the best state motto. (Although the competition
isn't exactly Olympic-caliber. Maine: "Dirigo", Latin for "I Direct".
Please.)

Liberals hate "Live Free Or Die." They hated it in the late 60s and early
70s, when I lived in New Hampshire, and they hate it still. The only
difference is that liberals have grown more powerful in the state as
southern New Hampshire increasingly consists of Boston bedroom
communities.

Indeed. We even had a case go to the Supremes about it.
(Argued by then Attorney General David Souter, who lost.) So now,
"living free" also includes the right to tape over the motto on your
plates, if you hate it enough. Now that's irony.

So I've enjoyed the latest motto controversy. New Hampshire,
inspired by its more liberal elements--or, more likely, by its real
estate developers--came up with a new
jingle; it doesn't really qualify as a motto: "You're going to love
it here." Feeble, no? Nevertheless, signs displaying the new slogan
were posted along highways entering New Hampshire. The result
was unhappiness…

This is where John goes off the track a little, unfortunately.

The "You're going to love it here" slogan was the brainchild of
a Portsmouth NH ad agency hired by the
New Hampshire Department of Travel and Tourism.
It's probably not politically motivated, other than by our state's ongoing
effort to get out-of-staters to come in and help fund our state
government. So that, um, we residents don't have to. (And don't think
we don't appreciate it, folks!)

It in no way replaces LFOD, the Official State Motto.

New Hampshire's highway welcome signs haven't, generally, ever had the LFOD motto
on them.
(There's one, on I-89 in Lebanon, which remains. My theory is that
it's there to irritate Vermonters, always an amusing activity.)
The welcome signs have pretty much always been bland; the new ones
simply went all the way to total smarmy adspeak.

But, thanks to the utter lameness of the "You're going to love it
here" slogan (as John points out):

The Senate passed a bill Thursday to require the state motto, "Live Free
or Die," on highway welcoming signs. The motto could replace the "love
it" slogan on the beige signs, or, more likely, appear on new signs.

Amusing side note:
Current news stories have our governor, John Lynch, all for
getting rid of the "generic" slogan; the Concord Monitor, however, recalls
that he thought it was great when it was officially introduced last
summer. Headlines the Monitor: "Lynch liked slogan before he didn't."
(This formulation will undoubtedly be John Kerry's most enduring
legacy.)

Heartwood

I'm catching up on James Lee Burke novels. This one is no exception
to his usual masterly stuff. This is his second Billy Bob Holland book.
Billy Bob is a lawyer, and ex-Texas Ranger based in Deaf Smith, Texas.
Like Burke's other major protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, Billy Bob is a
fundamentally decent but occasionally hot-tempered hero, incessantly
haunted by mistakes in his past.

The usual Burkean elements are here too: a rich but corrupt family
mired in evildoing; little people with the odds stacked against them;
characters with circus-freak physical deformities; characters with
psychological problems that would earn you or me a quick trip to the
rubber room; a touch of the supernatural. Inventive mayhem and intense
psychic
travail all the way through,
and a whole lot of dead
folks by the end.

And I don't think there's a writer alive whose descriptions can plunk
you into a scene like Burke. Rodeos, drive-ins, barbecue joints,
mansions: you're right there.

Quoting the Pledge

Here's
a book review from the Washington Post this week: What's been
airbrushed out of the quotation in the last sentence?

We click on over to the referenced review, go down to the
end, and read …

Yoshino
[the author of the reviewed book] might seem Pollyanna-hopeful to some, but his optimistic
insistence on fair treatment for everyone is really not much different
from our country's most idealist vision of itself: "one nation,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

At this point the hands are in the air, waving. "Oooh, teacher, I
know." Yes, the reviewer, one Terry Hong, has quoted the Pledge of Allegiance,
omitting the standard "under God" between
"nation" and "indivisible."

And seemingly ironically, the review is of Covering
by Kenji Yoshino. "Covering", states the review, "means to play down
certain characteristics in order to fit into the perceived mainstream."
And by leaving out "under God", isn't the reviewer "playing down certain
characteristics" herself? In order to "fit into the perceived
mainstream" of the reviewer's religion-phobic WaPo readership?
Ah-ha!Gotcha, Ms. Hong!

It would be so neat if that were the whole story. But in fact
the original text of the Pledge as written by
the socialist Francis Bellamy in 1892 doesn't contain the "under God"
phrase;
this was added by Congress in 1954.
Although it would be pretty to think that the reviewer was self-censoring
the quote, it's plausible that she is well aware of the history,
and actually does think that the "most idealist vision" of America was
Bellamy's original version. So Roger Clegg's "puzzle" is kind of a
misfire, sorry Roger.

And not that it matters, but:
the fact that it was
written by a socialist should be a red flag (heh)
signal to think about doing without the Pledge entirely, instead of
fiddling with its language. One would have thought the Congressional
Commie-haters in
the 1950's would have figured that out.
I love my country as much as the next guy, but the Pledge
is essentially a prayer
to the Holy State, and I find it increasingly creepy as I get older.

Debunking "Hate Speech"

Sean Clark catches
a Penn State student (quoted in a newspaper article) claiming that
"hate speech is not protected by the Constitution." Sean counters:

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that a statement like this has
been made. This belief has become somewhat pervasive, especially on
college campuses, making it high time to put this fundamentally false
and dangerous belief to rest.

And he does so, pretty convincingly. Sean's organization, the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a
great resource for countering illiberal restrictions on expression at
universities.

FIRE has given my own employer, the University
of New Hampshire, a speech code rating of red. Which is bad
enough, but it's probably only a matter of time before UNH does something
(um, again)
to embarrass itself by attempting to quash free expression.

The Two Minute Rule

Robert Crais has been one of the few authors I auto-buy in hardcover.
This new book is (unfortunately) not in his Elvis Cole series, but
nevertheless an impressive page-turner. The protagonist is Max Holman,
an ex-criminal just released from a ten-year sentence for bank robbery.
He has hopes to see his estranged son Richard, but Richard is a cop, and
he's gunned down with three other cops just before Max is released.
Max takes it upon himself to find out what happened to his son.
Things are complicated by policemen who have apparently been convinced
by a too-pat solution to the case, and don't appreciate Max's
interference.

Crais's characters are well-developed, the plot is intricate, and the
book was obviously meticulously researched. A long scene is set around
the famous Hollywood Sign,
and it's obvious that Crais has done some crawling around up there himself.

Firewall

Although this movie got kind of mediocre reviews, I thought it was
better than OK. Harrison Ford plays a network security geek for a Seattle
bank. Pay must be pretty good for that, because he's got a huge house
on the water. (Although his wife is an architect, so that probably helps
too.)
If you saw any previews whatsoever,
you already know about 80% of the movie: bad guys take the good guy's
family hostage, he tries to turn the tables on them. It's pretty
standard fare, but well done.

It was a pleasant surprise to see the luminescent Mary Lynn Rajskub
(Chloe on 24) play … well, pretty much the same character
as Chloe on 24. Does she ever worry she'll be typecast?

In (Indignant) Defense of House

Sally Satel and Jonathan Klick have a pretty good
article at NRO
on allegations of racial bias in medical
care. Unfortunately, they lead it off with an example from House,
and they get it all wrong.

Here's their excerpt:

Dr. Foreman to African American patient: Your blood pressure's a little
high. I have something new that should help you out. Combines a nitrate
with a blood pressure pill. It's targeted to African-Americans.

Patient: Targeted?

Foreman: Yeah, well, see we tend to have nitric oxide deficiencies.
The studies show this drug counteracts that problem. It's the first drug
to—

Patient: Ah…I've had white people lying to me for 60 years.

…

The patient rejects that drug, returns the next day, and finally leaves
satisfied when another doctor tells him, "I'll give you the same
medicine we give Republicans."

Then Satel and Klick comment:

This exchange between a black doctor and his black patient took place on
House, Fox's medical drama.
The idea that a physician (black or white) will give his white patients
better care than his black patients has, alas, found its way into
mainstream, primetime television.

I read this, and I say: whoa, hang on a cotton-pickin' minute. (And I'm
not trying to imply anything racial by using the term "cotton-pickin'", I
was just influenced at a young age by Tennessee Ernie Ford and Foghorn
Leghorn.)

How many ways did Satel and Klick get this wrong?

The only one claiming that blacks are getting inferior medical
care in this episode is the patient; he has no evidence for this
save his own
racial obsession.

It's not just "another doctor" saying "I'll give you the same
medicine we give Republicans.": it's Dr. House his own self.

He says this only after the patient says that he didn't get the
medicine that Dr. Foreman prescribed. (Says the patient: "I didn't fill
that Oreo's prescription.")

He also only says this after
the patient refuses to accept a prescription for the "racist drug" from
House as well.

But it later turns out that House lied to the
patient about prescribing the "Republican" drug;
he reveals to Foreman "I told him it was the white stuff. I gave him
the black stuff."

Foreman gets upset by this. I still can't figure out why.

So, rather than reinforce the idea that black people get inferior
medical care, this episode of
House debunks it. The black patient gets the
appropriate medicine despite his own misperceptions; both House
and Foreman do their best to make that happen. (And the only reason
House succeeds where Foreman fails is because House has no compunctions
about lying to the patient.)

I realize that
it's tough to set a strong opening hook on a magazine article. But
House, as near as I can tell, diligently avoids PCness and
political tendentia; it's
one of the reasons I'm a devoted viewer.
So I'm disappointed (and indignant!)
that
Satel and Klick misrepresent a fine TV show.

(A very dedicated fan has the transcript of the episode
here,
probably in violation of 19 different copyright laws. More power to him
or her.)

A Cure for the Blues

Unhappy? Depressed? Morose? Don't take those false drugs, suggests
George
Will; just become a conservative:

A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that conservatives are happier
than liberals -- in all income groups. While 34 percent of all Americans
call themselves ``very happy,'' only 28 percent of liberal Democrats
(and 31 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared to
47 percent of conservative Republicans. This finding is niftily
self-reinforcing: It depresses liberals.

My friend George attributes this to conservatives being "more
pessimistic" than liberals: they have fewer false hopes to be dashed.
I'd say instead that it's not an optimism/pessimism thing but
(to flog a meme I've mentioned a time
or two in the past) an
different-vision thing. Specifically: the difference between
"constrained" and "unconstrained" visions of reality.
(Also dubbed "tragic" and "utopian" visions.)

People should buy and read
A
Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. I'll
plagiarize quote a perceptive Amazon reviewer,
Marc Cenedella:

The Tragic (constrained) vision of human nature views man as possessing
foibles, incentives, and the desire to act in his own self-interest. The
Tragic "sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and
unhappy choices available, given the inherent moral and intellectual
limitations of human beings."
…

The Utopian (unconstrained) vision holds that man has not yet achieved
his full moral potential, and that that potential is essentially
perfectible. It is "foolish and immoral choices explain the evils of the
world - and that wiser or more moral and humane social policies are the
solution." …

Seen that way, it's little wonder that those of the
Utopian/Unconstrained camp tend to be on the unhappy side:
they know that the failures of the world around them are
caused by stupidity and malice; they are, in addition, constantly
frustrated by reality in bringing their own plans to fruition.

Just So You Know

URLs du Jour

2006-02-22

Professor Volokh looks
at an AP
story on Justice Scalia's talk at the American Enterprise Institute,
and asks if they're "fundamentally unserious." (Softball question, Prof.
The answer's yes.) He also notes that the AP was outreported
by blogger Ted
Frank both on overall substance and a relevant detail.
Interesting, not surprising. (Instapundit also comments.)

While many people I like are going batshit over a United Arab Emirates
company taking control over some operations at major American ports,
it seems Dan Drezner is a welcome voice of reasonableness
and proportion. And Mullings points out that
the episode demonstrates
the Administration's usual ineptness at figuring out how
such things will play in the political arena and taking preparatory
actions. Dartblog
detects politically-motivated hypocrisy in spades, finding
folks who were against racial profiling, before they were for it.

However, as an ankle-biter
noticed, Jimmy Carter thinks the deal is just
fine. That's enough to make any concerned American worry about it.

Dafyyd seems to also have a sound analysis
and a possible winning compromise. (As in: I can't see any obvious
flaws. But why would you expect me to see any obvious flaws? Do I look
like a foreign policy whiz?)

Newspapers can cause a storm of violent reaction
for publishing cartoons of
Mohammed, okay. But it turns out
you can't even draw an inebriated hillbilly
getting kicked off a log into a ravine without irking
someone, specifically Lynda Ann Ewen, PhD, Professor Emerita of
Sociology, Marshall University, and Co-Director, Center for the Study of
Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia. Go figure.

A recurring theme: we take the Internet too much for granted, and
we need constant reminders as how insanely great it all is. Today's
brief
essay on that topic is from Chicago Boy Mitch Townsend. In a
wish-I'd-written, he says:

You care about this because it is going to make your life better. You
will have more money. Your children will have a library card that is
close to the one the angels have in their wallets.

Exactly.

Also good today is Jonah
Goldberg who demonstrates that liberals who favor a
"living Constitution" in most instances
are more than willing to pound a stake into
its heart when it comes to the NSA's warrantless surveillance.
Mathew J. Franck is also impressed
and proposes "a simple test" to distinguish principle from expediency
in Constitution-interpreters:

[A]nyone who defends Roe v. Wade in any way, shape, or form as an
appropriate use of judicial power, has no standing to complain about
anyone's constitutional argument on any question. Blab about whether you
like this or that political outcome all you want, but don't try to
convince us that you are actually interested in the integrity of
constitutional reasoning.

PBS: it's good for something.
(A new motto for them, perhaps?)
Check your local listings.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-21

Richard Cohen op-edded
last week at the WaPo. He writes to "Gabriela", a student
who dropped out of an LA high school "after failing algebra six times in
six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over
ever getting it." Sample "advice" from Cohen:

Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have
never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You
will never need to know -- never mind want to know -- how many boys it
will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show
up later -- or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a
computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a
column or even a thank-you note -- or reason even a little bit. If, say,
the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid,
history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I
would be on its side. But algebra? Please.

There's been a lot of reaction, mostly negative. An excellent place to
start is (as you might expect) Joanne Jacobs; she comments:
"[I]f that's the kind of reasoning taught by writing, I'll take
algebra." She also has a lot of links to people doing more detailed
dissections of Cohen.

But Cohen's argument isn't new, and it gives me a chance to plug one of
my favorite writers on education, the late Richard Mitchell, who for
years published a beautiful small newsletter called The Underground
Grammarian. Almost twenty years ago, in Volume 11, Number
6, he considered the math-related
comments of a Peoria superintendent of schools, Gerald
Brookhart, who had displayed
an attitude similar to Cohen's:

Brookhart, naturally, puts us in mind of Socrates, and the strange thing
he said to Callicles, who thought himself a superior sort of person, and
thus entitled to more wealth and power than he had yet acquired. "It is
your neglect of geometry," said Socrates, "that leads you to want a
greater share than other men." The Brookharts of this world, having
never thought about it, assume that things like geometry and the
multiplication table are taught in schools only out of tradition, and
they are easily seduced into believing that such arts are useless to
those who aren't going to make some money from them.

But in fact the mathematical arts are the best studies in which to learn
certain truths that are essential to the making of wise choices. It is
in mathematics that we most readily see that the permanent relationship
between principle and necessity is not subject to appeal, that every
particular is a local manifestation of some universal, that there is a
demonstrable difference between what we believe and what we know, and
that experience can never do the work of logic. It is in mathematical
studies that a child (provided that there be a true teacher, and not a
Brookhart) can have his first inkling of Justice and Truth, and of the
immense and momentous difference between the laws and Lawfulness.

If you buy into the "job skills" model of education, Mitchell's argument
will seem strange, of course. But it shows most directly just how
seductively wrong Cohen's argument is. "Read the whole thing."

In fact, just about all of Richard Mitchell's published works are available
at this site; it's
one of the densest collections of wisdom you're likely to find on the
web.
It was set up by one Mark Alexander, also an Underground
Grammarian fan, who
blogs here.

Dafydd at Big Lizards chronicles
the legal maneuvering behind the effort to derail the California
execution of Michael Morales. The argument is that the procedure,
involving staged injections of three chemicals, might be painful
at some point.
Dafydd (be warned) describes Morales's 1981
crime in considerable stomach-churning
detail; I think it's impossible to care one whit
about a brief owie inflicted
on Morales after reading it.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-20

No, the University of New Hampshire does not consider
"President's Day" to be an actual holiday. Hmph. Thanks for asking,
though. In honor of the day, however, you could do worse than check
out David Boaz's appreciation
of George Washington, who was what we call today a class act.

Boaz refers to this New Yorker review of David
McCullough's 1776 in The New Yorker last year,
in which one Joshua Micah Marshall claims that Washington's character "was all a
put-on, an act." Marshall apparently thinks that "character" is
a given, innate, immutable property that can't be changed, let alone
improved, only covered up.
Fortunately, Washington knew
differently.

Lee Harris also has a good essay on Washington
at Tech Central Station.

Of course, not all ex-Presidents compare well with George Washington.
For example:
is there any anti-American government that Jimmy Carter won't suck up
to? The Ankle-Biting Bulldog looks
at Carter's recent WaPoop-ed
that demands we Play Nice with Hamas
and finds it disgraceful. Powerline has more on the
upstanding Hamas rulers and concludes:

Jimmy Carter is the terrorists' useful idiot, the man who, Lenin to the
contrary notwithstanding, wants to give (not sell) them the rope.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-19

Dartblog pays
attention to what Hamas has been up to after taking control
of the Palestinian Authority "parliament": (a) renouncing
treaty obligations that recognize Israel's right to exist;
(b) demand that Israel continue to send it $42 million each month.
Incoherent and violent, a charming combination.

Dartblog also points to today's
Dilbert, which makes a good point about oil economics while still
managing to be funny. You're
not going to see Garfield
manage that feat anytime soon.

But it's not all leeching off Dartblog today, although it could
be. He's on a tear, just go look.

Via Michelle, ma
belle, Drudge reports that
the beloved Mainstream Media are gearing up for yet another week of
Cheney-hunting. Over at HuffnPuff,
they're also trying to get a few more yards out of the dead horse of a
story, which means they're becoming even more meta; there's been
little actual news for days, so they write about the coverage, speculate
without evidence, then write about speculating without evidence, then
…

The four-day-old blog entry by Steve Martin is still the top "featured
post" as I type. Give them points for honesty, that's been the high point
of their coverage. Today's article by Arianna
is regrettably typical. She watched Meet the Press, which
featured Mary Matalin as a guest. I am not making this up: after
savaging Ms. Matalin's sins in jewelry, clothes, and makeup, Arianna decrees
that Mary was also "nasty".

In the meantime, at least 15 actual people were killed in Nigeria by
rioting Muslims. As I type, there's a link to the Yahoo! story
on the HuffnPuff front page … and that's it. Hamas?
Nothing.
Yes, never mind that, isn't that blouse Mary Matalin wore
just so absolutely dreadful? Over to you, Alec Baldwin and
David Mamet …

Arianna's also quite incredulous that David Gregory, NBC's White House
Correspondent, found it necessary to apologize for his Cheney-related
heated unprofessional exchange
with Scott McLellan earlier in the week. It really is true: when you're
on an obsessive Ahab-like crusade, you just don't see how you appear to
the non-obsessed. At least Gregory seems to have figured this out.
Will Arianna?

Elizabethtown

I've liked Cameron Crowe's past movies, so even though
the critics didn't like it much, I decided to check it out.
Not great, not bad. The problem is that it's about too many different
things: a family story, a love story, a dealing-with-failure story.
And it winds up being about an hour too long. And there's a lot
of yakking, mainly by Kirsten Dunst's character, saying things meant to
be deep. But movies can really only stand so many deep thoughts uttered
in conversation. After awhile, it begins to dawn on viewers that they're
watching a clever scriptwriter, not a movie.

That said, it's still kind of fun. Because the script is pretty
clever, and the supporting characters are quirky and interesting.
Nice to see Loudon Wainwright III again, always liked that "Dead Skunk"
song.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-17

Via BBSpot, a very funny
Wiredcolumn
in which Lore Sjöberg offers up his perfectly
believable explanations of why he was querying the Google
for things like "hot lemur on tarsier action".

As a matter of fact, it looks like you and I should read
just about everything
by Lore Sjöberg. And not
just because I like looking up the HTML encoding of ö.
Even though he looks like a young Charles Manson, I'm
sure he's just a nice Scandinavian-extracted kid at heart
like you and me. Well, me.

And he's an excellent writer too, like
you and me. Well, you.

UNH's own Shawn Macomber has been paying attention, and reports
that the French are really unpopular.

And if you're a geek looking for decorating ideas at home or office,
here are some
great ones. (Via GeekPress of course.)

Four Brothers

(Yes, movie weekend is beginning a bit early at Salad Manor,
due to a well-deserved day off.)

Every so often I'm surprised by a better-than-expected movie, and
this is one of those. The director, John Singleton, coaxes great
performances out of every actor involved. The script features
clever dialog, and doesn't skimp on characterization in favor
of mindless violent action. (Although there's plenty of that,
fortunately.) It's beautifully shot.

The idea is that four adopted sons of a saintly ex-hippie
(played by Fionnula Flanagan) is murdered in a convenience
store robbery. The brothers (Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson,
André Benjamin, and Garrett Hedlund) decide, with
varying levels of enthusiasm, to try to figure out whodunnit.
And, guess what, they do, with lots of ensuing mayhem.

It's not a great ad for the Detroit Police, however: only
one unambiguously honest cop is shown. They're apparently
unaware of several outbreaks of mini-warfare in the city until
they're long over. And they've got no problem with beating on people
under interrogation.

Fantastic Four

I put off seeing Fantastic Four due to lackluster reviews,
but I read this comic a lot in college, so how long could I resist?

The good: Michael Chiklis is just about perfect as Ben Grimm, aka
The Thing. He's the centerpiece of the movie, and rightfully so,
since he was always, at least to my college-age mind, the most
interesting of the quartet. And the special effects are pretty good.

And it was nice to see Stan Lee in a cameo. How cool must that have
been, to—even in a movie—actually talk to the superheroes you
helped invent?

The not-so-good: everybody else, including the venerable Dr. Doom. I mean
… they're practically teenyboppers in this movie!
Reed Richards was graying around the temples because he was, um, mature.
(In this movie, it's due to the accident that gives the group their powers.)
No doubt the script doctors claimed
that having heroes and villians older than 29 would have hurt the box
office. Feh!

Popular Mechanics Triumph

Instapundit points to a great article
at the Popular Mechanics website that criticizes
leaked excerpts from
the report issued yesterday by the Select Bipartisan Committee to
Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina.
They demonstrate "the report's most troubling shortfall: consistently blaming
individuals for failing to foresee circumstances that only became clear
with the laser-sharp vision of hindsight."

They have a followup article here based on their
examination of the full report. And (finally)
their current cover story on Katrina myths and recommendations
for the future is here.
It's all good.

That said, many folks have unrealistic idealized notions of
the infallibility and efficacy of
government action. Any actual response will inevitably
fall far short
of what they imagine the government could be doing.
So even if PM's recommendations were carried out in full,
it still won't prevent future well-publicized outrage over
the "inadequacy" of government disaster response.

And another thing: not to go all elitist or anything, but
Popular Mechanics isn't the first publication to
leap to one's mind when thinking of good, solid reporting and
analysis like this.
Why don't we see this sort of thing from more conventional
journalistic sources? Oh, right, they're busy doing Cheney stuff.

It seems Reason used to do this kind of thing, but
maybe that was back in the Poole/Postrel days …

URLs du Jour

The city is five square miles of low-slung industrial and commercial
buildings, laced with railroad tracks. Green space is nearly
nonexistent. Among the few splashes of color is the landmark mural of
farm animals on the side of the Farmer John pork processing plant.

Although (the Times reports) about 44,000 people work there,
the live-in population is estimated at 93. There are less than 60
registered voters.

Now, without looking at the article, can you imagine what sort of
city government Vernon has? Well, it's probably worse than you can
imagine: it's basically a setup to enrich those in charge, and
to maintain their grip on power. There hasn't been a contested
election in a quarter century. Almost all voters are "either city employees or
related to a city official."

The story concerns the efforts of a small group of people to
move into Vernon and get on the City Council. Who could blame them for
attempting to hop on the gravy train,
right? Of course, they get massive thuggish pushback from the entrenched
government; it's also an iffy question whether a convicted felon
is behind the effort to horn in on the cushy situation.

As Mel Brooks famously said in Blazing Saddles: "We've gotta
protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen!" Libertarians of all stripes
can only look, chuckle, and draw parallels between Vernon's government
and ones that differ only in degree, not in kind.

The Weekly Standard has an article
on "Web 2.0" by Andrew Keen. The main problem, thinks Keen, is that
it will get too many of the Great Unwashed
into the media creation game.

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy
of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of
creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley.
…
The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of
culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of
the '60s--the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so
presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Sorry, I don't see it. Nothing in current or future technology
is likely to repeal Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of everything is
crap.") Keen bemoans the destructive changes in the mainstream media:
newspapers, TV networks, the music industry, all in decline!
This shows, I think,
one of the cleavages between conservatives and libertarians: most
libertarians know that marketplace-driven destruction is creative
destruction. Conservatives just see change, and bemoan the coming dark
ages. I'm sorry, but the coming dark ages have been coming ever since
I was a kid.

The corollary to Sturgeon's Law is that ten percent of everything
isn't crap, and that's still going to be an unprecedented
flood of good stuff, that we don't have to rely on an "elite" set
of gatekeepers for us to find and present. This isn't utopian; it's just
what's gonna happen. To a large extent, it's already happened.

The real problem with Web 2.0, by the way, appears in passing
near the beginning of the article, meant to display a canonical
example:

LAST WEEK, I was treated to lunch at a fashionable Japanese restaurant
in Palo Alto by a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, back in the
dot.com boom, had invested in my start-up Audiocafe.com. The
entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his
latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software
tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and
music.

Yes, exactly. "Web 2.0" is, God bless it, an overhyped creature of
entrepreneurs making "pitches" in fashionable restaurants,
trying once again to turn the crank on the old money machine.
That's fine, I love capitalism and entrepreneurship, probably
more so than the next guy. But, come on, do we really have to
take the resultant hype all that seriously? No; keep your checkbook in
your pocket, unless there's something concrete behind the buzzwords.

Ironic note at the end of the article:

Andrew Keen is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and digital media
critic. He blogs at TheGreatSeduction.com and has recently launched aftertv.com, a podcast
chat show about media, culture, and technology.

Oh, OK then.

And I promised myself after yesterday: no more Cheney URLs! It's too easy.
But … oh, heck … Steve Martin.

In the Beginning…Was the Command Line

When I read just about anything by Neal Stephenson, I start
the comparisons: he's three times funnier than I; he's fourteen
times more literate than I; he's 48 times a better writer; …
well, you get the idea. Combination of admiration and jealousy.
And if he puts his name on a collection of grocery lists, I'm off to
pre-order it at Amazon.

Anyway: this short book is a discussion of computer user interfaces,
giving a nice brief in favor of good old Unix-style command line.
It being Stephenson, there are lots of entertaining diversions
off to places like Disney World, and Ames (Iowa) High School
in the early 70's.

The book is copyrighted 1999, which puts it out of date in
some respects. BeOS, which Neal liked a lot, is (I think it's fair
to say) mostly defunct. And Linux has come a long way toward
widespread respectability, which makes his salesmanship on its behalf a
little unnecessary today.

But some things haven't changed: Microsoft's OS's still stink on ice,
and the GUI metaphor continues to mean that a lot of CPU power is
(still)
spent on preventing users from knowing what's going on, and actively
confusing them in some cases.
Although, granted, you miss quite a bit with non-GUI web browsers.

Bottom line: luminescent writing on a geeky topic. I think non-geeks
would like it too.

Why Pun Salad Will Not Be Blogging the Winter Olympics

URLs du Weekend

2006-02-11&12

We're all a little weather-obsessed this weekend in the Northeast;
snow-deprived for so long, the major media is treating our current
snowstorm as a
replay of 1978.
My sister called from Iowa to check if we survived.

Folks, it's just snow. Happens most every winter.

That said, Carl Schaad of AccuWeather has a blog, and
it's really funny. Check
it out. If AccuWeather had a cable channel, I'd totally watch it
over those stiffs at The Weather Channel.

Half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma.
Parasites in the body - and the brain. Remember that.

But is that really true, or just what the mind parasites want us
to believe? Hmm…

Tyler Cowen, ostensibly an economist, also has his eye out
for matters of true import; via his Marginal Revolution,
he points to a Nature article that reports
one of the enduring mysteries of life (at least for physics majors)
has been solved: do people
swim faster in water or syrup? No spoilers here, you'll have to look
for yourself. One of the University of Minnesota researchers observed:

The fluid looked like snot. I don't know how to describe it any more
poetically.

Layer Cake

Movie Weekend continues with Layer Cake. It's a very
complex and well-acted crime thriller, centering on an anonymous
cocaine middleman played by Daniel Craig. His stated plan is
that old gangster-movie cliché: an early retirement.
Unfortunately, he's plunged into the middle of
high-level criminal doings that he only barely understands;
the movie's plot revolves around his fumbling efforts to
escape the myriad conflicts among his double-crossing
colleagues.
Dialog is witty, with understated humor bubbling underneath.
Recommended for anyone with the stomach for a little sex, a
lot of violence, and the ability to understand plot twists
explicated in various English accents.

I'm looking forward to seeing Daniel Craig as the new James
Bond. After seeing this, I'm pretty sure he could do a great job.

Break In

I stayed away from reading Dick Francis for years, thinking that his
books were about horse racing, and I had no interest in horse racing,
so that was that. And worse, he was British, so that conjured up all
sorts of thoughts about tea cozies.
Dumb mistake! If you're holding back from reading Francis for such
reasons, cease and desist.

This one has the usual Franciscan protagonist: a brave, loyal, and
fearless jockey cum
mensch named Christmas Fielding. (But his friends call him
Kit.) He is called to help out his sister and his brother-in-law rescue
their stables from financial ruin caused by scurrilous rumors planted in
the press for mysterious reasons. This puts him in enough peril, but in
addition, he's wooing the niece of an actual princess.
Great fun.

Stealth

If you've seen 2001 or even the episode of Star Trek
with Dr. Daystrom and his handy M5 computer running the
Enterprise, you pretty much have seen the first part of this
movie already: AI starts killing the good guys. The AI here is called
EDI, or "Eddie". As in: open the pod bay doors, Eddie.

The movie is set in the near future, where a trio of crack US pilots,
including that nice Jessica Biel,
apparently go wherever they want in the world to blow up terrorists.
Their stealth fighters are advanced enough to take down a bad-guy
multi-story building in the middle of a city without hurting any innocent
bystanders in the teeming streets below. (Apparently the building didn't
have any innocent janitors.) But Eddie breaks up this happy family
… oh, who cares?

Oh, and the screenplay was by W. D. Richter, who also wrote the
screenplay for the wonderful movie Slither back in the early
70's, and Big Trouble in Little China in the 80's.
Sad to see this descent into hackdom.

The Skeleton Key

This is in the Supernatural Thriller genre, Young Woman in Distress
division. Kate Hudson plays the Young Woman. She is hired by
an older woman (Gena Rowlands!) to take
care of her stroke-impaired husband (John Hurt!) in a decaying
creepy mansion in Louisiana bayou country. Everyone there is
a little crazy and haunted, save for the old lady's lawyer,
who just seems sleazy.

In short order, mysterious and disturbing things start happening to
our heroine. If you watch it, I suggest you
pay attention to those historical references and flashbacks; if you don't,
the ending won't make a lot of sense. Not that it makes a lot
of sense if you are paying attention; the plot depends
a lot on Kate Hudson doing exactly the things she actually does,
but we don't see many compelling reasons for her to do those things.

The MPAA rating advisory says: "Violence, Disturbing Images, Some
Partial Nudity, and Thematic Material". What you may be wanting
to know: does the partial nudity belong to Kate Hudson? Yes it does.
(I would have had to knock off a star or two if it had been Ms.
Rowlands.)
Said partial nudity
is (however) not enough to keep the movie from being rated PG-13.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-10

Constrained Katie has a roundup
of skeptical reaction to Dubya's
American
Competitiveness Initiative. It's the same old social-engineering
"investment" crapola, where megabucks targeted by wise and benevolent
bureaucrats will pay off handsomely down the road. Sure.

Remember "Rock the Vote"? It seems headed for an overdue and unlamented
death,
according to a recent LA Timesarticle.
Quoted is chairman of the board Fred Goldring, who speculates:

"We're like the popular kid who never gets asked out because everyone
thinks he already has a date."

If only Fred had been around when I was a kid! It would have been nice
to have a buddy tell me the reason I was home on Saturday night
was that I was too popular!

Here is the Rock the Vote website.
And they have a blog!
And, in second place on their "Current Issue Links" blogroll: the AARP! I'm obviously non-young, and
spectacularly unhip, but even I rolled my eyes at this.

But hipness aside: for a group concerned with
"political power for young people", a quick glance around the website
shows that RtV is spectacularly uninterested
in thinking critically about Social Security. Given well-known
demographic
and fiscal trends, it's tempting to speculate on
exactly how devoted RtV is to the political interests of the young.

All this spurred by a funny short article
at the American Spectator by Doug Powers, which riffs on the problems
of RtV specifically and tedious left-wing pop-culture icons generally.
Memorable paragraph:

Celebrities can really get full of themselves. Years ago, my wife and I
saw Don Henley in concert. Some great music, but in order to hear it,
those in attendance were forced to put up with a sanctimonious monologue
about saving Walden Woods that would have made Thoreau himself take his
own life. We came to hear "Boys of Summer" and "Hotel California," and
ended up nearly violating federal law by wringing the neck of an Eagle.

If you're looking for a good reason to throw fundraising appeals
from the Republican National Committee in the trash unopened,
Jay Tea at WizBang has
one. (Or, alternately, you could use the RNC's postage-paid envelope
to send Jay Tea's article to them instead of a check.)

But our own Senator Sununu continues to impress me, and (frankly) it's not
easy for a politician to do that consistently. Latest news is that he's
successfully encouraged the Administration to drop a couple of the worst parts
of the Patriot Act extension. Power Line has more, and
they speculate in addition that it (once again) puts Democrats
in between a rock (of appearing soft on terrorism) and a hard place (of
disappointing their moonbat base). Gee, that's too bad.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-09

The BBC echoes a
claim from Reporters Without Borders
that Yahoo! (which the BBC spells as "Yahoo")
provided data to the Chinese government that resulted
in the jailing of reporter Li Zhi in 2003. The Reporters Without Borders
press release is here.
(Via Slashdot.)

After a too-long absence, Iowahawk is back
with his usual insightful made-up reporting from the "seething Midwest":

Green Bay, WI - Like a pot of bratwurst left unattended
at a Lambeau Field pregame party, simmering tensions in the strife-torn
Midwest boiled over once again today as rioting mobs of green-and-gold
clad youth and plump farm wives rampaged through Wisconsin Denny's
and IHOPs, burning Texas toast and demanding apologies and extra
half-and-half.

Spot-on commenting
from Shannon Love at ChicagoBoyz on the revelation
that low-fat diet advocates are wearing the emperor's new clothes:

Many people pushed the low-fat idea not because the evidence backed it
but because it conformed to their social and political prejudices.
Low-fat diets appeal to puritanical moralists of all stripes. Leftists
love to castigate the corporate world for providing a high-fat diet to
ignorant masses. Blue Staters love to mock Red Staters for their
presumed high-fat diets and so on. Indeed, for every study that people
thought confirmed the idea there was easily one that refuted it. The
idea that the benefits of low-fat diets were well proven came from the
heavy marketing of cherry-picked studies.

Shannon goes on to draw parallels between this and other
politically-hyped "science" that (predictably) points to
Imminent Crisis
and demands Immediate Government Action.

My very own Senator Sununu is out front on the "Pork Barrel Reduction
Act". Here's
a plug at the Truth Laid Bear. I plan on dropping a thank-you note
to Senator Sununu, and a where-were-you note to our other Senator, Judd
Gregg.

By all accounts, pork is is a minuscule drop in the bucket in terms of the
overall budget. The bill could be (however) important in terms of changing
the political climate in Washington. How can they be expected
to trim the big spending items if they're unwilling to trim the small ones?

Not to mention that the whole pork thing is irredeemably seedy
and unbecoming, in the cases where it's not actually corrupt. So
go ahead and write your Congresscritters if you're so inclined.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-08

Don Boudreaux has an interesting note
which I think is
related to the Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization
mentioned a
couple days ago; Don looks at the tendency of some
to (a) take the level of government spending as reflecting
the "informed will of the people"; (b) point with alarm at
the budget deficit; (c) deduce that taxes must be raised.

Waitagoldarnedminnit, says Don. (I'm paraphrasing.) If the spending
level reflects the "informed will of the people", there's no reason
to think that the current taxation level isn't also the informed
will of the people. There's no obvious reason to prefer "informed will"
on one side over the other.

Or, alternatively, there's every reason to presume dysfunction on
both sides, not just the taxation side.

But the biggest shortcoming [of the President's energy proposals]
is the total absence of a program that would deliver any of these dandy
new technologies to the marketplace. By program we mean a uniform set of
incentives — what the economists call market signals — that
would drive American industry to build the more fuel-efficient vehicles
and the cleaner power plants that we need.

Reisman points out, not altogether calmly, that "what economists call
market signals" are produced by the market: people demanding
things that they actually want, as opposed to the things the
NYT editorial board thinks they should want. That is, of
course, exactly the opposite of what the editorial advocates.

Reisman concludes:

The New York Times
is a malevolent, alien influence, one that is hostile
to the United States' very reason for being.

Well, yeah. But what really irks me is their use
of free-market lingo to push for coercive measures. Orwell
memorably pointed to the comfortable English professor defending
Russian totalitarianism, who could not bring himself to say outright
"I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results
by doing so." Similarly, the Times can't simply say: "We believe
in forcing people to buy cars they don't prefer, and to pay sky-high
prices for gas when you can get good results by doing so."
They have to wrap themselves in the inflated language of
"incentives" and "markets". Bah!

Instapundit dubs the Coretta Scott King funeral Wellstone II,
after the 2002 funeral of Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota
which Democrats turned into a political rally; most folks not
driven by partisan hatreds found it distastefully ghoulish. And it
didn't
play out well for the Democrats in the 2002 elections, either in
Minnesota or in
the rest of the country.

But that didn't stop it from happening again at the King funeral.
Glenn's got lots of links to various reactions. And nails the problem
succinctly:

The problem with today's Democrats is that they try to invest the naked
hunger for power with the dignity of the civil rights movement, a
dignity that they no longer possess because it was based on a
self-discipline that they no longer possess.

And for whoever it was came here searching for "CathyPoulin pictures".
Here you go. But really, that's not a sign of a healthy mind.
(Background here,
fourth item.)

For the person looking for "Lumumba chocolate": What? Sorry, I got
nothing.

For the person looking for "Courtney Cox dress Longest Yard": I don't
blame you, but just rent the DVD again.

Let me go on record as saying I don't approve of the burning of
embassies. But I must confess I'm intrigued by the notion of causing it
to happen. Apparently the indirect method of causing embassies to be
burned down is both totally legal and also a highly prized right. As you
know, there aren't many ways you can burn down an occupied building and
get away with it. But it is completely legal to use your freedom of
speech to indirectly incite other people into doing almost any dumb ass
thing you can think of. That's a big reason I became a cartoonist.

So the next time you're about to commit mayhem because of a cartoon you
saw in a newspaper, you might want to second-think that a bit.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-07

Prof Bainbridge is disappointed
with Weare NH's town meeting that
failed to expropriate Justice Souter's house. In his typically
lucid and acerbic way, he says:

Pity. Somebody really needs to give this Court the finger one of these
days, if only to remind them that they serve the people instead of the
other way around. We've allowed these nine old codgers in robes to be
infallible, albeit only because they are final, which inevitably gives
them delusions of being a super-legislature empowered to solve all
social ills according to whatever personal preferences are shared
amongst at least 5 of them.

In Weare's modest defense: simple easy-going
neighborliness (by all accounts) make it difficult for many in the town
to confront a longtime resident this way.

Revealing your innermost feelings on the internet is good for you,
psychologists said today.

A study of the phenomenon of blogs - or online diaries - found people
writing them feel happier and more organised.

Note that as far as Pun Salad is concerned, the first paragraph
is only tenuously connected to the second. If "innermost feelings"
are ever accidentally discharged into this blog, cleanup operations
will begin immediately, heartfelt apologies
will be issued, and those responsible will be sacked.

3:10 To Yuma

I tend to put movies in my Blockbuster queue when I see a
recommendation from someone else on the Web; unfortunately,
the elapsed time from queue entry to actually watching the
movie can be months. So I don't remember why I rented this movie.
Somebody said it was good.

No matter. It's OK, a monochrome Western with psychological-thriller
undertones.
The underrated Glenn Ford is the voluble but dangerous
bad guy; he gives an understated and subtle performance that
really makes the movie work.
Van Heflin is the
borderline-failure rancher who gets roped into delivering him
to a Yuma-bound train while Ford's gang circles menacingly.
It builds to a tense, if slightly incredible, climax, as
Van Heflin smuggles a bomb onto a plane piloted
by Dean Martin… woops, wrong movie. Frankie Laine
does the theme song, so you can hear what Mel Brooks
parodied in Blazing Saddles.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-06

A wonderful
article at the Weekly Standard by Matt Labash
reports on Logan Darrow Clements' effort to get the
great town of Weare, New Hampshire to condemn Supreme Court Justice
David Souter's property, in order to build the "Lost Liberty Hotel".
This is an effort (you
may have heard) to protest Souter's vote with the majority
in the widely-despised Kelo eminent domain decision last
summer.

Although Labash says that Clements has "a whiff of the born-loser
libertarian about him," it was hard not to read the article and not
like and admire Clements for his stubborn, but good-humored, pursuit.
(And I'm a born-loser libertarian myself, although
not quite so much of an Objectivist as is Clements.) Sample:

An unapologetic capitalist in proud Randian fashion, Clements started
selling "Lost Liberty" items on his website, everything from throw
pillows to camisoles. He was flooded with suggestions for names of
dishes that he could serve in the hotel's Just Deserts Café. A
typical meal might start with the Chicken Seizure Salad and Revenge Soup
(served cold). For an entrée, there'd be the Bader-Ginz Burger with
Half-Baked Potato or the Eminent Lo Mein. Dessert might include Rocky
Road to Serfdom Ice Cream, or perhaps a nice plate of Petit Forfeitures.
Even without all the annoying puns, one could easily conclude it was
some kind of joke, though Clements's press release warns, "This is not a
prank."

Annoying puns? No such thing here at Pun Salad, Matt.
We are amused by every last one, even the ones we don't quite
understand.

Clements' website is here, where you can
buy stuff if you're so inclined,
and read the latest news about the effort. (Lately, it's been bad;
WaPo story here.)

The Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization: easy to commit, but once
you know what it is, it's also easy to detect. Will Wilkinson
explains it all for you.

GeekPress has been reading the "Things I Learn From My Patients"
thread at a discussion site for student doctors, and picks
some of the best. My favorite:

Never leave your last refill of Percocet in plain sight after your doc's
office closes if one of these 3 friends is coming over for dinner:

some dude

my friend

that bitch

Also, I must remember: never clean the bathtub naked while the
cats are around; it's dangerous! Hm, come to think of it,
the cats are always around;
best to just leave the bathtub-cleaning to others.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-05

Here's how Joe Malchow works: at 8:34am on Saturday, he
says blogging will be "light today".
This is followed by
one,
two,
three,
four,
five
postings in less than 24 hours;
then at
3:29am Sunday
he posts an long and well-researched article on the recent history of the
"backlash against Muslims" meme, which, like most mirages,
always seems to be just ahead, but
never actually arrives. Sample:

As George Bush has said, the entire system of Islamic fundamentalism
is eerily similar to Communism, in that it is pillared by peons and
controlled by rich elites. As has always been the problem the top-down
elitist regimes, the West has an irksome habit of attempting to supplant
tyranny with freedom. The Islamists have guarded against this
troublesome interest in human rights in two ways: through terrorism and
by convincing Muslims that every day brings the high likelihood of a
genocide prosecuted against them by everyone else in the world (the
infidels) and that therefore ‘offense’ must be
taken—or in the least, professed—early and often.

One major component of insightfulness is a long memory,
and Joe's obviously got one. Or at least he remembers enough
to ask the Google the right questions.

Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On
the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight,
pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of
global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on
the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the
rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently
raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which
makes the question somewhat moot.

But it's not all insightful out there today. In fact,
in a (London) Timescolumn,
one Simon Jenkins bemoans the awfulness of the "derisive images of
Muhammad." Here's a typical paragraph:

To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish
cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best
policy would have been to apologise and shut up. For Danish journalists
to demand "Europe-wide solidarity" in the cause of free speech and to
deride those who are offended as "fundamentalists … who have a
problem with the entire western world" comes close to racial
provocation. We do not go about punching people in the face to test
their commitment to non-violence. To be a European should not involve
initiation by religious insult.

In the war for free speech, Jenkins clearly is staking out
the Neville Chamberlain position.
Saying that Danish journalists come "close to racial
provocation" cravenly avoids having to consider whether what they're
saying is true. Which, of course, it is. But Jenkins' mind just
slips by this inconvenient fact, because it's easier just to slap
the "provocation" label on it. (And to make false analogies to violent
behavior. Publishing pictures is not "punching people in the face.")

Jenkins warns that the alternative to self-censorship of the press
is real censorship by the state, asserting a neat dichotomy that makes it
easy to reach the "right" conclusion. A flat and principled defense
of free expression is out of the question.
He concludes:

The best defence of free speech can only be to curb its excess and
respect its courtesy.

Back in the day, a military guy once said about a Vietnam battle:
"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."
Jenkins has the same attitude toward free speech: to save it, it
must be destroyed.

Belated New Hampshire Holiday Crime News

From the Dover (NH) police log, as published
in the January 16 Foster's Daily Democrat (free registration
probably required):

Gail P. Napolitano, 49, of 80 Union St., Dover, was arrested on Dec. 24
and charged with simple assault, domestic related, following a dispute
with her mother. Napolitano allegedly winged a fruitcake at her
71-year-old mother, who had been staying with her for the holidays,
after learning of her mother's decision to spend Christmas Eve night
elsewhere. She was released on $500 personal recognizance bail, and had
a court date on Dec. 27.

Christmas, of course, always brings its share of fruitcake-winging
incidents, not only here in New Hampshire, but as far as I know in the
rest of the country. When will our legislators wake up to ban this
alleged "foodstuff"? Too many of our homes have them just lying around,
especially during the stressful holiday season; a simple momentary flash of
hot-headedness can result in yet another senseless winging. Because of
their usefulness as doorstops and paperweights,
fruitcakes are often carelessly left within reach of children.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-04

On the Mohammed Cartoons: if you'd like a brief history
and a much more eloquent defense of free expression
than the one I provided yesterday, check Paul Marshall at
the Weekly Standard here.
Matthew Hoy makes sense as
always, and Virginia Postrel does too.

And Eugene Volokh, pbuh, compares and contrasts
the Boston Globe editorial on this controversy
to those it made on Serrano's "Piss Christ" and similar NEA-funded
Christian-irritating art. He discovers a disparity unsurprising
to those who read (or, in my case, used to read) the Globe.

The funny thing is that the Globe views fundamentalist Christians as a
god-besotted threat to liberty, but makes excuses for people like this.

Might quibble with that "funny" though. How about "tedious"?

Let's give intolerant hotheads
belonging to other religions some link love, though.
Joanne
Jacobs links to a story from Bennett, Colorado, where some
parents are upset that their children were shown a video
about the opera Faust, in which (you may have heard) the title
character sells his soul to the devil.

No mention of whether the dismayed parents were Christians, or
thin-skinned Satanists
objecting to a negative portrayal of Mephistopheles. In any case,
Joanne reports
the teacher "plans to look for a job next year in a less
conservative town." Also unmentioned: whether she was threatened
with decapitation.

URLs du Jour

2006-02-03

Meme Watch Department: The Google reports a measly 177
hits for "shadeggelic," up only 29 since we looked on January 21.
Since Congressman Shadegg lost the race for Majority Leader,
I suppose we're looking at a Failed Meme, at least for now.

The "Oprahfication of America" meme is also looking pretty
peaked: only
267 hits, an increase of 33 from
January 20. We'll continue to track it, though.

Time to bloviate on the Muhammad cartoon issue.
Let's stipulate the following:

Threatening (let alone comitting)
violence
against those you think have insulted your religion/race/culture is
a Really Bad Thing.

That's where I'm coming from, anyway. Free speech can be offensive
to some; those who get violent or coercive against free-speakers should
be slapped down, hard. The only alternative grants censorious
power to the easily offended; applying that
censorious power will engender endless rancour;
the final result will be tyrannical.

So: I'm dismayed by the State
Department; I think Hugh
makes some good points but is basically misguided.

Eric Raymond says: The
Cheesecake Factory Must Die. I'm in heartfelt agreement.
We wanted to go to the one in Providence RI a couple years back.
Their website "helpfully" pointed to a MapQuest map that put us
in the middle of a Providence neighborhood that might be most
charitably described as "in decline".

Eventually we found it.
Once we got there, however,
service was poor and the food, including the
cheesecake, was mediocre.

Also on my must-die list: Ruby Tuesday. Tried twice, once in
Portland ME, once in Orlando FL. Same crappy service and
less-than-mediocre food in both locations; that's enough for me
to give up.

Groundhog Day

As a little self-constructed ritual,
I watch this movie every year on February 2.
It gets better every year.

Last year, Jonah Goldberg wrote a paean to
Groundhog Day in National Review;
you can read the first part here.
A very religious interpretation
of the movie is here.
A nice essay by Alex Kuczynski at the NYT
is here.

PASADENA - A raucous initiation turned embarrassing early Tuesday when
two dozen Caltech students - dressed in Superman capes, tutus and other
outlandish outfits - were rescued after getting stranded on the Mount
Wilson Toll Road. …

The annual "Mount Wilson Night," when freshmen are initiated into Page
House, one of the dorms at Caltech, had started off as planned, said
Nick Goeden, a Caltech sophomore who was called early Tuesday morning
to aid rescuers.

Way to go, Page Dudes.
Thank goodness we never did any stupid stuff like that. Oh, wait…

Destined to be featured on every website owned and operated
by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy…
stop me if you've seen it already…
Hillary does her Ed
Grimley impression. "I'm as doomed as doomed can be, you know."

URLs du Jour

2006-02-01

While I remain in New Hampshire,
Jay Nordlinger has been sent to Davos Switzerland to hobnob
with the powerful. I weep bitter tears at the unfairness
of life, but Jay is having to make some sacrifices:

Funny thing about Switzerland? You look forward to having hot chocolate
here, in the land of chocolate? You know, aprés-ski and all that? They
give you this mediocre powder in a packet, and a cup of hot water.
Strange. I think I had better hot chocolate from Meijer's Thrifty Acres
circa 1972.

Chicago Boy Mitch has done the Exact Right Thing
in digging out
this gem from Richard Nixon's State of the Union Address:

As we move toward the celebration 2 years from now of the 200th
anniversary of this Nation's independence, let us press vigorously on
toward the goal I announced last November for Project Independence. Let
this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980,
the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the
energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our
transportation moving.

Why, yes that was 32 years ago.
Good example of why it's a bad idea to waste time paying attention
to State of the Union Addresses.

And Jay Tea at Wizbang! adds another reason
why I'm glad I dropped my subscription to the Boston Globe.
(Lets see, that makes what, about 138?)

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